Koodoz Design

It’s all over the news. YouTube is dropping support for IE6. One of the first top-tier websites to do it, I reckon, which makes you wonder why it hadn’t happened before. Us working online have been ranting about it for quite a while —just as we did with IE5.5 and Netscape 4.7— as making stuff work on it costs us dearly in terms of time and resources and despite what I may have said before, it’s not a lot of fun.

This just raises a big question. Now that large-scale, popular websites are starting to drop support for the old fella, should everyone else follow the lead? I guess it depends on who and where your target audience is. A quick look at our stats tells us that IE6 users account for less than 2% of our traffic. But we’re a design studio and I’m sure that most of our readers are tech-savvy enough to know better. However, I have another site which I developed as a hobby, it’s a Spanish-language dating website, where IE6 users surpass 60% of the total traffic! I simply cannot drop support for it.

The IE6 Upgrade bar approach

One alternative is to do what YouTube is doing right now: adding a bar asking IE6 users to upgrade. We have done just that for our new site and I’m convinced that it is the right way to go. Mark Trammell @ Digg doesn’t agree. Digg conducted a very enlightening survey of IE6 users. They found out that most users don’t upgrade because they do not have enough privileges to do so or because someone at work will not let them. Trammell argues that displaying the upgrade bar on those people’s screen is outright sadistic. I, on the other hand, consider that as more websites start doing it, it will certainly help to generate pressure on sysadmins and bosses. Besides, they themselves must be using it, so if they decide to upgrade, so too will the people dependent on them.

How to display an IE6 Upgrade bar

So you’ve made up your mind about it. How do you go about delivering the message to IE6 users? There are several ways. One is to use conditional comments. IE parses certain HTML comments as instructions just for itself. These comments will be ignored by all other browsers and you can even target specific versions of IE. If you wanted to display an upgrade bar using conditional comments, you would use something like this:

<!--[if lte IE 6]>
	<div id="ie6-bar">
		<p>Please upgrade your browser</p>
	</div>
<![endif]-->

Another alternative is to take advantage of PHP’s get_browser() function. get_browser() is quite versatile and provides an array of very interesting information about the user’s browser. You need to configure your server to use the browscap.ini file. It’s all in the PHP manual. Using get_browser() to detect IE6 users and serve the upgrade bar can be done like this:

<?php
$browser = get_browser(null, true);
if (($browser['browser'] == 'IE') && ($browser['majorver'] <= 6)) : ?>

	<div id="ie6-bar">
		<p>Please upgrade your browser</p>
	</div>

<?php endif; ?>

Both methods have their pros and cons. Conditional comments are quick and easy to implement, but you’ll be sending extra data to people with decent browsers. get_browser() is a little bit tricky to get working and requires a small amount of php processing. However, people not using IE6 will never come across the extra code.

So there you go. If you have any thoughts on the subject, agree/disagree with this post or need some help, just shout!